44
39
95
* This table is taken from The Economist of 30 August 1952. Another table in the same paper showed that Russia's industrial saturation, i.e. her output per head of population, remains well below that of Western Europe, although it is approaching that of France. Here again, Russia is much further behind Western Europe in consumer industries than this table indicates, but she is also more ahead in engineering and armament.
In the present decade Russia is beginning to overtake the combined industrial power of Germany, France, and Great Britain; and she obviously aspires to catching up with the United States in the not too remote future.
Whether or not Russia will ever be able to realize her ambition of attaining industrial parity with the United States, the mere fact that she is about to leave behind the combined industrial power of the great nations of Western Europe and is thinking ahead so ambitiously, gives a measure of the profound transformation she has undergone in the Stalin era.
This transformation has taken place on the basis of a publicly owned and planned economy. Stalinism claims to have provided the first historically significant demonstration, carried out on a gigantic scale, that planning is the most effective method for the rational use and the most rapid development of a nation's economic resources. Stalinism has implanted this conviction in the new Soviet generations even in its most bitter opponents and enemies among them; and it impresses upon the new generations of China and Eastern Europe that their way of escape from inherited poverty and the anarchy of their underdeveloped capitalism lies also in a publicly owned and planned economy.
What validity, it may be asked, has this claim concerning the superiority of Soviet planning? How much of Russia's industrial expansion has been due to planning, and how much has been achieved by, for instance, the use of forced labour?
It is important to make a distinction between the fundamental elements of the Soviet economy and its marginal phenomena. A few years ago the number of the inmates of Soviet concentration camps was most implausibly estimated by Western commentators from 12 to 20 millions. If these figures were correct the whole Soviet experiment in planning would be only of negative significance to the rest of the world, for it would represent nothing but the recrudescence of slavery on a staggering scale.
However, much laborious research and some evidence from inside Russia have reduced these speculative figures to more plausible proportions. Dr. N. M. Jasny for instance, an able but also a most extreme Menshevik critic of Stalinist economic policies, has reached the conclusion that at the height of the deportations the total number of inmates of those camps may have amounted to three or four millions. Morally, this makes little difference: the use of forced labour is equally repugnant and its condemnation remains equally valid whether four or twenty million people are involved. But a more precise idea of the dimensions of the problem helps to bring the economic picture of the Stalin era into more realistic focus. It disposes of the theory that the Soviet economy could not function without forced labour.